If you’ve searched for something on Google recently, you may have noticed a wall of text appearing before the search results. This feature, called AI Overviews, offers an AI-generated response to certain queries. But it also pushes your list of links further down the page, making scrolling a bit annoying when you want to do your own searches – and it will get even more annoying once Google starts inserting ads there.
But even though Google doesn’t let you turn this feature off, there are a few ways to get around this problem.
One of the best ways to “turn off” this feature is to reconfigure your browser’s default search engine options. The tenbluelinks website offers instructions on how to do this in Chrome on Android, iOS, Windows and Mac as well as in Firefox on Windows and Mac.
You can block AI previews by setting your default search engine URL.Screenshot: Emma Roth / The Verge
The next time you search, you should no longer see the AI previews.
Or you can try setting a filter in uBlock.Screenshot: Emma Roth / The Verge
There are also other easy ways to avoid AI previews, including with uBlock Origin. A Reddit user discovered that you can avoid this feature by downloading the uBlock extension for your browser. You then head to the settings menu, go to the My filters section, paste google.com##.GcKpu from the list and select Apply changes.
And finally, if you just want to avoid AI previews from time to time, you can do your search and then select More > Web to get a list of sites without AI presentations (and without advertising).
Either of these methods should give you a break from AI search results – at least until Google rolls out an “off” button.